Carlton Reid’s Roads Were Not Built for Cars is a revisionist history, reclaiming the role of bicycles in the development of roads and the cars that dominate them. When a class, a race, a gender reclaims its history it is usually in the cause of self-assertion. After reading this I was indignant when a privileged usurper tooted me for walking across the entrance of a cul-de-sac which they were turning into. Listen, these are my f***** streets too, you know. The later Victorian age. The railway lines had cut through the country on their purpose-built tracks and profoundly changed ideas of mobility. The roads, once well maintained for mail coaches,…

This is a guest post by The Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, a new initiative from Demos. Just in case you haven’t heard: data is now ‘big’. 90% of the data in the world today didn’t exist a few years ago. This revolutionary arrival of data – not only in vast quantities, but often real-time – has rarely been off the lips of the commentators and opinion-formers of the tech world. Big data is also valuable. It’s now classed as a commodity, like oil and gold. It’s become so valuable not only because we’re producing more than ever before, but also because we can understand it better than ever. As…